SOCIAL INFLUENCE MARKETING

INFLUENCER MARKETING refers to marketing strategies which mainly involve focus and concentration being directed towards particular individuals instead of the whole market. These individuals are often people identified with tremendous influence on the activities of many potential clients for a brand. In this modern marketing technique, such individuals are known as influencers.

With the explosive growth of the social media within the last decade, communication has been revolutionized together with many business concepts. Word of mouth is probably one of the most valuable marketing methods known to influence over 40% of purchasing decisions worldwide. In the new social media universe with modern digital, emotional, inspirational, business and fanatic relationships, word of mouth is fast expanding and evolving from recommendations by family and friends to the revolutionary influencer marketing platform.

The influencer marketing concept is not just based on increasing awareness but additionally about providing an impact on sales for any brand. Therefore selecting a potentially successful influencer is very brand and campaign sensitive.

The emergence of influencer marketing nowadays is due to the fact that, most consumers are lethargic towards billboards, bulletins, newsletters, commercials, digital adverts and other traditional marketing schemes. They are showing preference to personal research on a brand or hearing about it from trusted people. A further reflection of this can be seen in the growth of influencer marketing as it is fast turning into one of the most effective ways of pulling clients and customer for all businesses.

A key aspect to address which enables every business to successfully set up an efficient influencer marketing system is identifying and engaging with the most capable and fit influencers for your brand. Social influencers are proving to be the best choices for many businesses in this era and picking authentic ones highly guarantees the improvement of value because they make available their loyal audiences including their networks. Also, the platform they offer, on which relations between your brand and the audiences can be enhanced is the social media which doesn’t take breaks ensuring continuity and probably high Return on investment (RIO). Selecting authentic experts in the industry who boast huge followings with genuine believe in your brand should be the main focus in order to succeed with influencer marketing campaigns.

In addition to driving sales, authentic social influencers build brand loyalty. In the early days of influencer marketing, many businesses targeted the most popular and most followed individuals as influencers. However, it has proven not to always produce optimum results. The ideal social influencer for your brand could be; a dedicated fan, a loyal client or a passionate brand patron who happens to possess the specific necessary qualities to move the brand forward.

Setting up a firm influencer marketing system involves the following components;

Find and highlight the subject matter of influence that is related to the target audience of your brand.

Evaluate potential influencers for brand contextual fitting, while focusing on the search for quality content, reach, engagement and relationship with brand values.

Approach and connect with the targeted and chosen influencers and negotiate partnering with them for some compensation to build strong mutually beneficial bonds.

Quantify media earnings taking note of the influencers and topics that happen to improve your brand the most.

After identifying and testing who and what works best for your brand, the next building experience has to be an even stronger influencer marketing strategy.

FINDING THE RIGHT SOCIAL MEDIA INFLUENCER FOR YOUR BRAND

Even before approaching any potential influencers for your brand or business, the following influence features are to be covered in detail;

Relevance: checking for influencers who post and share content directly relevant to your brand. Also, the relation between influencer following and target brand audience is particularly relevant.

Reach: this highlights the following size of the influencer whom potentially reaching could be of value to your brand.

Resonance: this is a measure of the engagement levels between the influencer and his audience that is relevant and of value to your brand.

When checking potential influencers for relevance, reach, and resonance, it’s important to have settled on other issues such as answering the question of WHO in particular do you want to influence?

Any brand shouldn’t find it so difficult outlining the best possible audience, customers, and prospects for their products. However, your influencer marketing campaign cannot influence everyone so it takes great concentration and understanding of your goals and potential audience to provide meaningful answers to the question of WHO you want to influence.

The next key question to provide meaningful responses to is that of WHO is trusted by your customers, prospects, and community?

The essential requirement recommended by marketers for genuine influence is trust. In the absence of the trust component, improvement for the brand will be superficial and substantial business impact non-existent. This highlights the need for brand targeted audience to trust and respect the judgment of potential authentic influencers to partner with.

BEST SOCIAL INFLUENCER MARKETING PRACTICES

Social media influencers are fast becoming very important to businesses and expect to be recognized for driving value to brands. These key approaches will ensure long term beneficial influencer relationships.

Reach out slowly; after identifying an ideal social media influencer you want your brand to partner with, it’s important to slowly begin the engagement process by reaching out through conversations they are leading already and content they are sharing already. An example is participating in a twitter chat hosted by your target influencer or commenting on their blog posts to indicate you are interested and reading their content. Building such a rapport most often ends with a mutually beneficial relationship.

Mutual value; every business partnering relationship yield more productivity when both parties mutually benefit from the relationship and social influencer marketing is no different. Finding some ways for influencers to also benefit from partnering with your brand such as content swap provide conducive conditions for meaningful long-lasting relationships.

Consistency; in addition to finding influencers who contextually fit your brand’s domain, it is very beneficial finding someone with content having cohesive looks and feel with those of the brand. Also, an appropriate tone in how your brand is presented to potential customers is vital.

Measure the results; though a generally tricky task to quite clearly carry out, measuring the results and aiming to track engagement of influencers through analytics and detailed reports on post reach and activity is a key practice in social media influencer marketing.

Any successful growing business in this era can make use of this evolving revolutionary marketing strategy (influencer marketing) to achieve remarkable brand value and recognition.

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